Week 10 Wrap Up

Aaaaaaand that’s all she wrote for Week Ten. Let us know how you did in the comments, and set some goals for Week Eleven–we’re almost done! Good lord!

And if you’re looking for some writing advice, here’s a piece from William Zissner, a writing tutor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism (h/t to Randall Stephens and The Historical Society). His philosophy on good English writing boils down to the following:

Short is better than long.
Simple is good. (Louder)
Long Latin nouns are the enemy.
Anglo-Saxon active verbs are your best friend.
One thought per sentence.

The rest is worth a read–if you don’t mind his “Anglo-Saxon” linguistic fetish. I’m pretty sure that those “words that resonate with the oldest truths” are more accurately Indo-European in origin, because some of them are shared across Slavic languages as well, but the writing advice itself is very solid. By which I mean, he repeats all of the things my adviser tells me on a regular basis.

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One thought on “Week 10 Wrap Up”

I am continuing to work steadily on getting through my summer class- fortunately our movie days are becoming more frequent (2 more weeks!!). More importantly, I have started work on my August writing challenge. As of day 2, I have 6 very rough pages. I am enthusiastically writing garbage and footnoting abundantly with an eye toward an aggressive edit once I have a full draft. This week I told my advisor about my writing challenge and she encouraged me to formalize my accountability by being the first to workshop my paper with the CHAT fellows. so OH GOD somebody is actually going to read this mess in mid-September.
My goals for this week are to keep averaging a page or two a day, as well as start outlining of the latter part of the paper so I don’t have to schlep a bunch of books back to Washington when I leave for [working] vacation mid-month.